RUSSIA RELIGION NEWS

Protestant legal experts discuss Jehovah's
Witnesses' plight

--Roman Lunkin, for Portal-Credo.Ru: Beginning
in 2009 in
Russia there have occurred systematic prosecutions of Jehovah's
Witnesses,
their literature has been ruled to be "extremist," and their
religious organizations have been prohibited. The Russian Ministry
of Justice
is asking the Supreme Court to completely ban their activity on
the territory
of all of Russia. What will be the consequences of this ban?

--Anatoly Pchelintsev: The consequences of
ruling the
Jehovah's Witnesses to be an "extremist" movement as a whole will,
in
my view, be catastrophic. Russia will be the first state in the
modern world
that has prohibited in it this completely peaceful religious
denomination (we
will not take North Korea and several middle eastern countries
into account). This
decision will be blatant arbitrariness, a violation of those
obligations that
Russia took upon itself before the international community, and a
violation of
our own constitution. Tens of thousands of people will find
themselves under
threat of criminal prosecution without being terrorists and
extremists.

I cannot get it into my head how personnel of
the
prosecutor's office, special services, and Russian Ministry of
Justice could
decide that it is possible to deal so severely with more than a
hundred thousand
Russian citizens. After all, they have the very same
constitutional rights as
the other citizens of the RF, and after the fall of the Soviet
Union they even
were recognized as victims of political repression and received
corresponding
certificates. Now it turns out that all of this remains only an
empty
declaration on paper.

Against the background of the Yarovaya Law,
discrimination
against believers has acquired a monstrous scale, as was not even
in the soviet
times, since in the time of the USSR it was at least
understandable, from a
logical point of view, that religion was being destroyed as a
"class
enemy." Now supreme democratic principles and adherence to human
rights
have been declared, but in practice it turns out to be exactly the
opposite. Do
law enforcement agencies understand where they are pushing the
state and
society? Regarding this I have a great question.

--For many Russian believers it is not evident
whether they
should stand up for Jehovah's Witnesses. Why is this important for
other
confessions?

--My opinion is that persecution of any group
of believers
necessarily affects the whole situation surrounding religious
liberty in the
country. And the Jehovah's Witnesses are a large, Russia-wide
organization that
is in some sense significant in the sphere of religious policy. If
the
Jehovah's Witnesses are persecuted, then that means later "on the
block" will come other religious movements also, for example,
protestant
churches. Orthodox "sect fighters" have toward them a negative
attitude
just as aggressive as toward Jehovah's Witnesses. And it is this
kind of
"sect fighters" who in the present time are discussing plans for
adopting new legislation against "sects" in the Russian State Duma
and the Federation Council. There are also "sect fighters" in the
Expert Council for Religious Studies Expert Analyses under the
Russian Ministry
of Justice. I am not now talking about new religious movements,
about Hindu
movements, for example, the Society of Krishna Consciousness, who
are being
subjected to massive attacks in the press.

That does not seem little to anybody. Another
question: will
Orthodox believers remain unaffected by this disastrous policy?
Isn't it
necessary to talk about how Muslims are disturbed by prohibitions
on wearing
scarves in schools, difficulties in constructing mosques, and
privileges on the
part of the government only with respect to one religion?

Today in a whole number of regions of
Russia—Moscow, Kaluga,
Kuzbass, Bashkiria, Perm territory, Tiumen province, Samara,
Krasnodar, and
others—there already have begun inspections in protestant
churches, with
searches, examination of documents, attempts to open criminal
cases and to find
"extremist literature," or to fine for the absence of identifying
markings on existing literature, and the like. Can one consider
all these
actions and deeds of law enforcement agencies accidental
coincidences? I do not
think so.

--Why, in your view, is it that the existence
of religious
liberty is so important for the life of any state, if it is, of
course?

--The absence of worldview liberty,
figuratively speaking,
deprives a state of reason and it gradually withers. There is not
one single
example in history where a state and society would be successful
in the absence
of toleration and religious liberty. The history of our fatherland
is a clear
example of this. One of the driving forces of the fall of the
Russian empire
and subsequently the USSR was just this absence in society of
freedom of
conscience, and the desire to arrange everybody in an ideological
single file.
The curtailment of rights and liberties on the whole in the
country is embodied
most cruelly in persecution of believers, inasmuch as under an
authoritarian
system a group of people immediately arises which posits that some
citizens do
not have the right to existence, because they believe "not in that
God" or do not worship him "just so." The group of people takes
upon itself the right to decide who is a potential enemy and who
is not. And we
are already hearing such statements in the press on the part of a
number of
"experts." The wave of repressions provokes fighters with
"sects" to mass denunciation with respect to other believers,
which
has already happened all over after the adoption of the Yarovaya
Law. And
already hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens are being
dragged by
completely baseless prosecutions, and the police and prosecutor's
office are
seeking "extremism" in places where it does not exist and even
cannot
exist, by definition. Such a policy inevitably will lead to social
upheavals.

Stalin and Hitler, with their concentration
camps and mass
murders, were not able to break the Jehovah's Witnesses, and they
survived in
conditions of the underground. Does the current government really
wish to
resemble the aforementioned tyrants?

One thing is obvious: for Jehovah's Witnesses,
Armageddon
has already arrived, and believers of other confessions are
awaiting their own
apocalypse, for what is happening is the matrix of the Antichrist.
(tr. by PDS,
posted 29 March 2017)

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